Vibe » Janelle Harrishttp://www.vibe.com
Just another WordPress siteTue, 03 Mar 2015 19:38:46 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0Your Genes vs. Your Jeanshttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/your-genes-vs-your-jeans/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/your-genes-vs-your-jeans/#commentsMon, 30 Jul 2012 13:59:59 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29748You spot them across a crowded sales floor, or maybe a congested thrift store rack. Denim works of art. The perfect pair of jeans, if such a thing even exists. Beautiful cut, lovely wash—even the little rivets have panache. You swoop down on them, terrified another stylish shopper will make eye contact with them first, and scuttle them back to the fitting room, ready to make love to your mirrored image from the waist down.

Except they won’t come up past the middle of your thighs. Or they do this weird creasey thing across your hips. Or they pucker out so far at the waist, you look like you’re a little tea pot, short and stout. There is your handle and there is your spout.

If I never had to shop for another pair of jeans, I’d do two cartwheels, a round-off and a Tae-Bo kick across the mall parking lot. Jeans are a fashion staple, but next to bras (which belong in the seventh ring of hell), they’re my least favorite thing to look for, and sometimes, my least favorite thing to wear. I’ve broken nails trying to zip them up. Flopped back on my bed wrestling into them. Analyzed my hindquarters from every possible angle under the unkind glare of department store fluorescent lighting trying to buy them. Liked the way they fit my legs but hated the way they rode up in the crotch. Liked the way they fit around the waist but hated the way they flattened my rump. Squatted down in them to manufacture some give when they’ve been damn-girl-can-you-breathe? tight.

If you’re a Black woman, you probably have curves. And when you’re a Black woman with curves, you’ve probably experienced the deflating realization that most designers have visions of Angelina Jolie or Kate Hudson dancing through their heads when they strike out to create a new line. But newsflash: for at least the last five years, and probably longer than that, the average American woman has been rocking a size 14. But you wouldn’t be able to tell by the waif-like sizing of most jeans or the obvious lack of models with meat on their bones.

So when Levi’s introduced Curve ID, I snickered. Levi’s? The same brand the white girls in my high school poured their stick figures into? Seems as though the company is having a hard time breaking with their own stereotype. Their most recent ads for the line purportedly for thicker girls only proves their definition of shapeliness is a few stick-thin chicks with gams the size of my forearms. They defended themselves by saying they do celebrate different body types. Alas, those images, few and far between as they are, were relegated to a Facebook page with some 3,000 fans, a far cry from the pages of the print magazines that reach millions of readers. Pity.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/your-genes-vs-your-jeans/feed/0Things I’ll Never, Ever Do in a Relationship Againhttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/things-ill-never-ever-do-in-a-relationship-again/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/things-ill-never-ever-do-in-a-relationship-again/#commentsWed, 25 Jul 2012 13:54:51 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29541Denial, devastation, self-doubt. They’re three of the stages of recovery from the imploding of a relationship. Not the kind when you finally cut ties with your on-again, off-again, break-in-case-of-emergency jumpoff or you tell the dude you’ve been seeing for two or three months that you don’t think it’s going to work out. There are some pairings that need to be put on a pedestal in the annals of your personal history. They’re the ones that require the mixed CDs of Isley Brothers and Al Green tunes as a soundtrack to your sadness and make cookies ‘n cream and Doritoes the bedfellows of your heartbroken sorrow. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

I’ve been through one bad breakup. I should say, I survived one bad breakup. He had been my first love. Next to losing my grandparents, that was the most intense emotional pain I’ve ever been through. That thing was real. I remember it vividly: he called me in the middle of the night to tell me that he had a new girlfriend. I recall sitting up in my bed screaming. Literally. Whole household is asleep, and there I am, mouth wide open, hollering like an infant in a bassinet because this dude no longer wanted to be with me. So much so, he hauled off and got himself a new woman to solidify his done-ness.

There’s one more step in the sordid process of recovering from a broken heart: resolution. Part of that is coming to peace with the fact that it’s over. The other is fondly remembering the good things and learning from the ones that made you want to backslap the foolishness off yourself—like these five things I swear I will never, ever, not never do again.

Allow myself to be giddy about that gray area. Homeboy and I were together two years, three if you count that weird, in-between stage where we did all the things that we did when we were officially together, like spend time and have sex, which of course kept me nice and emotionally connected. But when he didn’t feel like being bothered or when I was getting too girlfriendy for his liking, he swiftly reminded me that we weren’t together. I was just happy he was paying me mind, so I stayed in that space for way too long. Hell, I should’ve never been in the first place.

Have a baby out of wedlock. Aside from being in love with the man, we’d had a baby girl together. I adore her and I surely don’t regret her as my child, but I do regret not waiting until I was in a healthy, happy marriage. My mama warned me not to be like her, a single mom raising a child on my own. But I was too head-in-my-behind, heart-in-the-clouds. I just knew me and this guy were the exception to the statistics, not thinking that once upon a time, my mother and father had probably been in love, too.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/things-ill-never-ever-do-in-a-relationship-again/feed/0Black Folks Can Be So Embarrassing At Timeshttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/black-folks-can-be-so-embarrassing-at-times/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/black-folks-can-be-so-embarrassing-at-times/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2012 14:49:14 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29507My, how I love my people and all of the idiosyncrasies of our Blackness. I do. But that doesn’t mean that every once in a while, something or someone will crop up and make me want to issue a press release on behalf of Black America in general. Any time I see Flavor Flav or Herman Cain respectively—Lord help me, never let them show up anywhere together—I get nervous about the impending and inevitable shenanigans about to befall our people. Celebrity coonin’ aside, there are other things that Black folks do that make me want to hang my head in shame.

We dry hump TV game show hosts. Bob Barker must be somewhere heaving a huge sigh of relief that this girl didn’t come charging down the aisle at him when her number was called to come on down. Black folks have been known to cut up on game shows—the potion of competition and the possibility of free money makes us giddy—but there seems to be a special place reserved on The Price Is Right for our tomfoolery. And although I can certainly appreciate this particular contestant’s jubilance, all the big money spins in a hour-long show can’t justify wrapping her legs around Drew Carey like she’s an extra in Dirty Dancing. Yeesh. Calm down.

We browbeat each other for overpriced sneakers. If I don’t ever hear the word “Jordans” and the number “11” in conjunction again, it’ll be too soon, particularly as it relates to top news stories that involve watching grown men mollywhop women, children, and the maimed and disabled to score a pair of sneakers that cost all of 25 cents to make in some faraway sweat shop. Every single time the news covered a story about some simple-minded crime involving those doggone sneakers, I held my breath waiting for the name of the assailant. And every single time, it was something like Derquan Jackson or Otis Jenkins and I knew, without a doubt, that another one of us had drunk the Kool-Aid and paid dearly for it.

We refer to all Asian people as “Chinese.” My apologies to the entire Asian community for the continuous oversights of some of my brethren and sistren, who seem to think that the whole big continent is comprised only of China. I once heard a frustrated woman in a beauty supply store declare that she could. not. stand. Chinese people, which would’ve probably stung more if the owners of the establishment weren’t Korean.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/black-folks-can-be-so-embarrassing-at-times/feed/0WTH?! That’s Her?http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/wth-thats-her/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/wth-thats-her/#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2012 15:40:16 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29079So it’s been confirmed: your man is cheating. Tricking. Stepping out on you. After you snooped through his texts and uncovered his Facebook flirting, cracked his email address and hacked his Twitter account, heeded your cousin’s warnings and listened to your best friend’s plots for vigilante justice, it’s really real. What started out as an unsettling suspicion gnawing at the bottom of your stomach was promoted to a nagging pang in the back of your head that became a reality brighter than a cheap pastel Easter suit right in front of your very eyes. But then you stumble across a picture or worse—see the chick in person—and you think what the blazin’ frumpy hell?! Is it be kind to animals month or did I really get played for this?!

Guys will insist that cheating has less to do with how physically irresistible the side piece is and more about the need she’s fulfilling that main girlfriend can’t or won’t. (Even my own boyfriend dared to cosign this idea, which proves he really does have a steel set given the highly sensitive nature of the subject and the potentially volatile nature of this writer.) And in the land of logical checks and balances, it would make sense if your man percolated on your commitment for a breathtaking sista built like the human number eight. Heck, the offense might even seem somewhat forgivable. But being dissed for Brianna Basic can rock your self-confidence down to its core. What does this no-frills heffa bring to your man’s table that you don’t?

With the 80/20 rule in play, there’s as many answers as there are homewreckin’ hoochies in the world. (And with the march of reality TV starlets still beating strong, we’re ever-dismayed to know just how many that is.) Knowing that despite your best, all-in effort, only 80 percent of your dude’s needs are going to be satisfied makes that 20 percent deficient seem like a chasm as wide as Louis Farrakhan’s part. It’s an open invitation for trouble, even in the tightest couples. In the end, does it really matter how the woman who can come between you and your main squeeze looks? Not at all. But it sure makes for plenty of good heckling ammunition when you and your sista circle gets hold of the information.

So beautiful ones, you know as well as I do that 1) a Negro who takes his 20 percent out to market doesn’t deserve your time or tears in the first place and 2) the other woman who didn’t realize she was indeed the other woman should get a pass from any harassment about her physical shortcomings, especially when measured against someone as fabulous as yourself. But if said side chick was a willing participant, fully knowledgeable about you and your role as his woman/wife/girlfriend/lady, then get ready to be as creative as Mother Nature made her homely. It ain’t about maturity—it’s about comedy.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/wth-thats-her/feed/0Manners Still Matter: 20 Annoying Things People Do to Be Rudehttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/manners-still-matter-20-annoying-things-people-do-to-be-rude/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/manners-still-matter-20-annoying-things-people-do-to-be-rude/#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2012 13:03:04 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29076I’m not a stickler for too many things—even though I’m a writer and grammar geek, I don’t even flinch when people say “conversate” instead of “converse”—but it irks my ever-lovin’ last merciful nerve when folks toss bad manners out into the world for everybody else to deal with. Sometimes it’s an unconscious, just-didn’t-know-any-better faux pas. And those kind of little social slips I can let slide with a raise of my eyebrow and a fleeting mental tsk tsk tsk. But more and more frequently, I’m bumping into this rampant breakdown of all things good and decent and courteous, behavior that’s a real eff you to the home training checklist that most of our parents and kindergarten teachers used to teach us.

It’s not that I’m vying to be the diva of refined social decorum. It comes from being raised in a household where rudeness—especially from a kid—was not only unacceptable, it was dangerous. Breeze past an adult in the house or at church without saying “hello” loud and clear enough to for them hear and see if you didn’t get yanked up by the back of your collar. Even when I brought friends home from college, they joked about my family being the most please and thank you-ing bunch they ever met. So coming from that immersion in super politeness, it could be just me. But I wonder if my fellow Clutchettes have noticed that manners have taken a massive, long-term sabbatical while bad behavior—like the following examples compiled with the help of my Facebook family—kicks all hell loose on the streets?

1. Not covering coughs and sneezes. It just can’t get any more basic than this but it happens all of the time. How hard is it to raise your hand or crook of your arm to keep personal germs… personal? Somebody launching a spray of nasty, funky snot and spit into the air from their uncovered nose or mouth is setting themselves up to get cursed out after they send everyone around them running for the nearest bottles of Lysol and hand sanitizer. Gross.

2. Loud cell conversations. For some reason, folks’ filters are put in the wind when it comes to talking on the phone in public. They give play by plays of the wild jungle sex they had last night, strategize the child support case they’re waging against their no-good baby father, speculate about the weird bumps they found around their happy place when they were getting out of the shower—all while they’re in the 15 items or less line or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. A personal conversation need not ever become public knowledge but for some reason, folks get real caught up in conversations that put their business on blast.

3. Standing too close at the cash register. Unless you’re planning on chipping in on the bill when that total rings up, there’s no reason for anybody to be standing in the back pockets of someone paying for their items at the store. Put that stuff on the belt if there’s space and then make like Onyx and back the heck up. No one wants anybody breathing down their neck at the ATM so the same goes when they’re punching in their pin on the little card device at the Shop & Save.

4. Letting it all hang out. Ill-fitting clothing is 1) a slap in the face of fashion and 2) an awkward insult to the people who have to lay eyes on it. I don’t care what nobody says: a woman with her 38 DDDs hogging all of the available oxygen in the room in a shirt that is vacuum-suction tight and five inches too low is just as rude as a little dude with his pants sagging mid-thigh and his booty flapping in the breeze. It’s an abomination to all good thoughts to look up and realize that the only thing separating you from some random guy’s wide open butt is a paper-thin pair of dingy cotton boxers.

5. Failure to launch (out of your seat). This one grinds my nerves down to the root: not standing up for elderly people, pregnant women and (for men) women in general on public transportation is fodder for a whole other article in and of itself. But it’s a sad, sad state of affairs when an 80-year-old man with a cane or an about-to-bust lady with child struggles onto the train or up the steps of the bus only to be left standing by a whole row of folks sitting defiant and not willing to do the right thing. At least offer.

6. Acting like you’re at the carry-out. You didn’t bring so much as a bowl of Chex Mix or a six-pack of sodas to your boyfriend’s family function but you have three Tupperware containers stashed in your purse for your own personal after party. You were wrong for coming empty-handed but, unless you were invited to do it, you’re super duper dead wrong for ripping off a piece of foil to take something home.

7. Letting your kids run wild. Nobody but you thinks it’s cute that Little Earl almost knocked down five innocent shoppers while he was playing a solo game of hide ‘n seek in the racks at TJ Maxx. If you didn’t look like you could whoop my behind up one side and down the next, I’d snatch him and shake some sense into him myself, but I’m forced to ask you to do it instead.

8. Facebook and Twitter etiquette. Some people don’t know how to act in real life, so that certainly translates to their presence in the big, wide world of social media. Posting naughty pictures of your ex’s man parts and tagging his new girlfriend or worse, his mother? Wrong. Making smart alecky, disparaging, just plain heffa-like comments on walls and status updates? Stop. Uploading unflattering pictures of your girlfriends just because you happen to look good in them? Rude. Your online activity is still a reflection of you so be ladylike, even in cyberspace.

9. Not speaking. Walking into someone’s house, parking your tail in somebody’s car, going to a function and hanging on the fringes without so much as a ‘hey, how you doin’?’” will surely make you the hot topic of conversation after you leave—and it won’t be about how cute your shoes were, either.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/manners-still-matter-20-annoying-things-people-do-to-be-rude/feed/022 Reasons to Get Your Black Card Pulledhttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/22-reasons-to-get-your-black-card-pulled/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/22-reasons-to-get-your-black-card-pulled/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2012 13:06:08 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=29034I don’t like collard greens or sweet potato pie. I don’t eat grits—with sugar, eggs, shrimp, cheese or salt. Don’t eat them period. I’ve learned how to play dominoes and spades probably 20 times now and for the life of me, I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I can’t remember the rules long enough to call them up the next time somebody tries to draw me into a game. I’ve never seen I’m Gonna Get You Sucka or Coming to America in their entirety. And I really don’t see what all the fuss over Anita Baker is about, although admitting that almost got me beat up one time.

For these and probably a dozen more reasons, I’ve had my Black card threatened on more occasions than I can rightly count. Even my own daughter tried to take it when it came out that she could beat me pretty easily in two Black girl rites of passage: numbers and double dutch. Forget that my graduate work is in African-American studies or that I can flawlessly transition from the Electric Slide to the Wobble Dance without being that person who gets the rhythm all jacked up. Doesn’t matter. You might be born with it, but holding on to it is a whole different story. Lawd don’t I know it. And you might just lose your black card if:

1. You stumble through the first stanza of Lift Every Voice and Sing (or you only come in loud and proud on the chorus) but you know “Moves Like Jagger” word for word.

2. You can name every character on Gossip Girl but struggle to identify the three original cast members on Dreamgirls.

3. You can’t celebrate Barack Obama being in the White House, even if you don’t agree with his politics.

4. You ease your hand down to lock your car doors or subtly grasp your purse strap tighter when you see a band of young, Black men approaching.

5. You brazenly use the N-word in mixed company or even worse, you call a person in mixed company the N-word.

7. You don’t have at least one uncle living in his glory days, an aunt who’s hanging onto 35 when she’s almost 65, or a cousin who “went away” for a little while.

8. You cannot, on command, list five Luther Vandross songs.

9. You don’t support Black businesses—and you badmouth them to anybody who’ll listen—because you had a bad experience one time seven years ago.

10. You call Kool-Aid by its actual flavor instead of identifying it solely by its color.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/22-reasons-to-get-your-black-card-pulled/feed/0Stepping to the Side-Chickhttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/stepping-to-the-side-chick/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/stepping-to-the-side-chick/#commentsMon, 16 Jul 2012 19:00:30 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=28937It starts with that grating feeling in the pit of your stomach, works its way up to the base of your neck, and shakes your intuition awake. Your man is seeing somebody else—you think.

Besides running up on him vigilante-style with Joey Greco and his “Cheaters” camera crew in tow, your other option is to do your own behind-the-scenes investigative work to confirm your suspicions and vindicate your snooping.

Y’all know the drill: check pants pockets, sniff shirts, rifle through car consoles, dig in gym bags, scan store receipts, crack Facebook passwords, and read text messages. Those who seek shall almost always inevitably find, so when you uncover proof of his doggishness, the first step is usually one of two things: a) confront him or b) confront the other woman.

Sometimes she’s completely unaware that dude has a girlfriend or, even worse, a wife. In that case, it’s kind of hard to hold her responsible when your man has worked just as hard to deceive her as he did to deceive you. But sometimes she’s just a bold, brash and brazen heifer who could give two pieces of nothing about y’all being in love since college, your two kids or your plans to get married next fall. She’s just trying to get hers. And that? That right there is the brand of other woman who makes you want to grab your sneakers, pop off your acrylics, snatch out your earrings and slather some Vaseline on your face. That is a woman who makes it real hard for a lady to stay ladylike.

]]>http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/stepping-to-the-side-chick/feed/0Property of Sallie Maehttp://www.vibe.com/2012/07/property-of-sallie-mae/
http://www.vibe.com/2012/07/property-of-sallie-mae/#commentsTue, 10 Jul 2012 14:47:35 +0000http://www.vibevixen.com/?p=28682Her name strikes a chord of regret in the hearts of millions of folks who were, once upon a time, college students. Some finished, some didn’t. But many of us must pay the great white beast known simply as Sallie Mae. I hate that heifer. If I catch her out on the streets, I’m blacking both her eyes and chipping two of her teeth.

Since I’m the first person in my family to have the privilege of going to college, there was no background knowledge on the mystifying world of post-secondary financial aid. Fortunately, a one-two punch of excellent grades and fairly decent SAT scores earned me a full ride to, among others, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first HBCU in the country and an institution that had turned out some pretty impressive luminaries (excuse me for a moment: LU!!! Lincoln pride!!! Okay, carry on.) For my first two years of school, I didn’t have to worry about paying for too much of anything, save a super expensive English book that put me over the amount that my voucher was worth. Then mysteriously, the scholarship was no longer being offered and I was forced to throw together my own financial aid package, a conglomerate of grants, smaller scholarships and those dreaded, damned, “what-did-I-even-learn-that-was-worth-this-much-money?” student loans.

I don’t even want to tell you how much I owe. Actually, I couldn’t even if I really wanted to because I literally avert my eyes from the grand totals whenever I’m on the website. (It’s the visual equivalent of covering my ears and going “lalalalala” when someone’s saying something I don’t want to hear.) Childish? Maybe. Irresponsible? Perhaps. But I tell you as sure as I’m sitting here on this sofa at 7 AM with unbrushed teeth and a silk scarf on my head that if I knew the depth and extent of my debt to that corporate extortionist (and the federal government, because I owe them a few bucks, too), they’d have to cart me away and spoon-feed me Jell-O in a padded white room.

I shouldn’t single Sallie Mae out, though they have been accused of redlining and overcharging Black and Latino borrowers. I hate all student loans from all originators and lending institutions for all people everywhere trying to make a decent living without the ghost of academic past knocking at their door. I hate the concept that you go to school because society and your family and the working world is forever emphasizing the importance of being educated but when you get that golden sheet of paper and all the knowledge that goes along with it, you have to spend the next 10, 15, heck, maybe even 30 or 40 years of your life paying for it. It doesn’t matter if you never do anything with the major you specialized in or the degree you worked so hard to earn. They ain’t splittin’ hairs if you make $17,000 a year as a parking attendant or $160,000 a year as a litigator. They’re going to come for you. And even if you die, your family is still on the hook for the education you took with you to the grave.

There’s been ongoing and widespread outrage about predatory lending from mortgage companies but based on the horror stories I hear from friends and friends of friends and other folks I run into in my random travels, student loans are just about the worst form of predatory lending anytime, anywhere, anyplace. (The credit cards they send you and your jobless college student tail during your first 90 days on campus are THE worst, but that rant is fodder for another article.) What’s ironic is most of the time, you don’t even have any credit but you’re permitted to dig yourself into debt for the sake of your education. You’re what, 18, 20 years old? You’re living away from home for the first time, and the parents and adult family members you’re so hell bent on asserting your independence from are umpteen miles away. You go to register for classes and—gasp—the financial aid office almost gleefully reports that you have a balance and that in order to stay on campus and attend class, you need X amount of dollars to clear up your bill. Panic sets in like the side effects of a bad Mexican dish. Even if you call home and, through a series of heaving, almost incoherent sobs, relay the bad news to your folks, you know they don’t have anything close to the $3,000 or so dollars that you need to stay in school (because it’s never like an easy, breezy 300 bucks.)

Now, the financial aid folks do offer you an alternative. You could just sign this application here and all your worries will be alleviated and your obligations satisfied—for the time being. They shove a few forms with text as dense and intricate as a Shakespearean sonnet under your desperate little nose and explain, in abbreviated albeit cryptic terms, the conditions of your loan with one glowing, neon sign-bright bottom line that sells you: you won’t have to pay until after you graduate. Phew! What a relief. That’s at least a few years away. You unknowingly sign your deal with the devil and traipse off to the cafeteria to get a piece of fried chicken and tell your girls the good news.

Then you graduate. Congratulations flow. You party. You celebrate. You thankfully move into the “I’m an adult for real for real” phase of your life. You might get your first apartment. You hit the pavement to put those book smarts and that internship experience to work in the real world. Oh—and you get a call from your student loan servicer welcoming you to the repayment phase. Yeah, it’s time to pay up, baby girl. You and two-thirds of other college graduates who leave school with debt, most of it at least $20,000. Graduate and professional students have it even worse. Those loans average anywhere between $27,000 to $114,000, depending of course on the field, school and specialty. And in this market, none of those MAs, BSes, PhDs or MSWes are adding up to j-o-b-s. In fact, defaults are at their highest rate in 11 years. And even if, in the dire straits of drowning in good debt gone bad, you file bankruptcy, guess what? Everything, even your gambling obligations, can be discharged—except your student loans. Those you still have to pay.

I’m not even going to pretend to have the solution to remedy the high cost of education in this country. I’m just a freelance writer and editor with a Bachelor of Arts in English and an almost-finished Master of Arts in African-American Studies that together will cost me, by the time all is said and done, way more than they’re probably worth when interest is compounded by them and reluctantly paid by me. I just know firsthand how terrible it is to second-guess your pursuit of education because the only way you can finance your desire to learn is through borrowing money. It’s messed up. There is $85 billion in student loan debt burdening everybody from anesthesiologists to architects. It’s funny—I paid all that money to learn but one of the greatest lessons I got out of school was to read the freakin’ fine print.